What is your view of magazines like Penthouse and Playboy? I have maybe
30 of these magazines and a dozen soft-core DVDs. I store them in my
closet, but you start to get close to some women, and they feel entitled
to go through your things. I don't want to throw everything out or lock
it up, but, in many cases, this stuff seems to be a deal breaker. How
should I react to women who don't want it in my house at all?

--Rated Ex

On airplanes, they have little light strips along the aisles to help you
exit in case of emergency. Install them throughout your house so your
snoopy girlfriends will have no trouble finding their way out the door.

Whatever happens, you'll always have Miss February. Sure, people are
bound to stare when you're out to dinner with a magazine page
Scotch-taped to the chair across from you, but there are a few things
you can count on: She'll always be naked; she'll always be smiling; and
she'll never crawl off page 89 and start ransacking your sock drawer
when you get in the shower.

Your dates would indeed have something to worry about if your house were
decorated in "Porn Star Neo-Traditional," with Jenna Jameson wallpaper
and matching drapes, and instead of two stone lions guarding your porch,
two snarling statues of Briana. Since you have maybe 30 of the tamest
skin mags around (quaint pictorials compared to what's free on the Web),
plus a few dirty DVDs, it's not like these ladies were in danger of
being crushed by an avalanche of porn whenever they opened a cupboard or
closet. In the absence of a nasty addiction on your part, the deal
breaker should have been the invasion of your privacy -- not what some
woman thinks you should do in the privacy of your home. Remember, even
the government needs a search warrant to go through your stuff.

What does it say about a man when he enjoys looking at nude photos of
really hot women? Umm...he's heterosexual? Male sexuality is all about
the visuals. It's always been all about the visuals. This is a
Pleistocene-era design element, hardwired into men over 10,000 years ago
to keep them from missing mating opportunities -- not something they
picked up from watching too much TV.

Women's sexuality is different. Compared with men, women have a very
high cost per sex act -- pregnancy -- which is bad enough when you're in
a hospital, where you can scream for an epidural. Squatting on the Great
Plains, then having to drag around and feed a bunch of furry little
buggers had to make a lady choosy about which guy she'd let take her
behind the bushes. So, women evolved to look for a man they could count
on to stick around and make the mortgage payments. Women, for the most
part, don't care about seeing men naked. Quite frankly, we'd rather
shop.

Each gender has its sexual Disneyland. While men fantasize about
"pornotopia," note researchers Bruce J. Ellis and Donald Symons, where
everybody's too busy having no-strings-attached sex to "talk about the
relationship," women turn to romance-otopia, the multi-billion-dollar
romance novel industry. Women's "commitment porn," with its formulaic
happily-ever-after-gasm, "imposes a female-like sexuality on men that
is...perhaps no more 'realistic' than that of pornotopia," writes
psychology professor Catherine Salmon. "But no one is out there lobbying
to ban romance novels because of the harm they do to women's attitudes
toward men."

Contrary to the unsupported claims and flawed data of women who've
turned victimhood into an industry, most porn doesn't exist to demean or
promote violence against women. "If there is one thing all
(heterosexual) porn videos have in common, it is the portrayal of women
engaged in some form of sexual activity," observes Salmon. She points to
the bottomless pit of gay male porn as "the ideal test case" that male
appreciation for porn "is about sex, and not about violence or the
degradation of women." And no, porn films don't cause rape -- any more
than movies like Ocean's Eleven make people want to rush out and rob a
casino.

You can find a woman who understands this stuff, but you'll have to
broaden your search criteria from "pretty" and "hangs out at the corner
bar" to include terms like "thinking," "logical," and "has self-esteem."
Be patient in your search -- or be prepared to ladyproof your closet
with a combination lock. Once you find a qualified candidate, keep
showing and telling her how hot you find her. This should reassure her
that your smut stash is merely occasional entertainment -- not a
precursor to your running off with the "Girls Of Ace Hardware!" or
installing a peep show in your front room and whispering sweet nothings
like "Got more quarters?"